


Aftermath

by Anonymous



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: also canon typical attitudes towards Very Bad Things, and i was wondering what the dynamic between them would be afterwards, canon typical asshole behavior, especially given how codependent the gang is, expressed here as alternate universes/realities, i saw a fic where mac gets mad and assaults dennis, it isn't very graphic about the actual act itself, so i wrote 4 possible aftermaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 14:51:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17428034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: How are you supposed to react when your best friend of 25 years literally screws you over?





	1. Dismissive

**Author's Note:**

> I don't usually write this kind of story, which is why i'm (hopefully) posting it anonymously. I'm wary of how fandoms often tend to weirdly sort of fetishize rape so I stay away from that sort of thing. That said, I did read a fic where an argument ended in Mac assaulting Dennis, and I got curious about what the aftermath would be, especially given how codependent the whole gang is and their tendency to treat each other like shit anyway. I ended up having different ideas about the possible reaction in slightly different circumstances, so I wrote 4 different versions. 
> 
> I was trying to look at the longer term picture and, for brevity, ignore more of the day to day details. I kept getting kind of swept up in it, though, so the chapters get progressively longer as it goes on. The first one is the shortest.

There’s a world where he doesn’t take it seriously.

It’s gross, it’s shitty, and he reams Mac out about it, but then he moves on. The two of them have put each other through hell, done just about everything under the sun to each other, and this is really just a natural extension of that.

Dennis figures it out when he does his monthly pass through the footage of his bedroom, double-checking that anything worthwhile (mostly sex, but also any day he looks particularly good) is saved to his hard drive and deleting the rest. As he’s forwarding through, he’s startled to see Mac dragging him into the room. He plays the video at normal speed, and watches himself be half-carried, totally blacked-out, in from the hallway and onto his bed. It’s not unusual for him to drink himself into oblivion, but it _is_ unusual for Mac to remain relatively sober while he does.

On the screen, Mac deposits Dennis on the bed and, after a moment of what seems like gloating, starts stripping him. And then getting handsy. What follows is definitely disturbing, but not particularly surprising. Dennis had known that Mac wanted to fuck him; he hadn’t known that Mac already _had._

Of course, Dennis isn’t just going to let that slide. When Mac wakes up the next morning, he’s covered head to toe in rashes from the poison ivy Dennis had sprinkled liberally between his covers. He freaks out, and Dennis shrugs- how would he know what had happened? Things like that are up to God. Later, when Mac finds his favorite shirt torn into pieces and rearranged into an upside-down cross, he says that same thing. And when Mac’s hair starts to fall out (it had worked for Charlie with the waitress, after all). And again when Mac falls inexplicably ill, and when his clothes are suddenly too big for him, and when his phone mysteriously stops working.

Mac is totally convinced he’s angered God somehow; he’s halfway to stuffing himself back into the closet when Dennis finally takes credit for all that hard work. He’s pissed all hell, pun fully intended, and a spike of very real, very unexpected fear shoots up Dennis’s spine when Mac lunges at him. But Dennis ducks out of the way and grabs the poker from the fireplace, holding it out in front of himself to keep Mac at bay while they hash this out.

The fury in Mac’s face grows as Dennis gloatingly explains his plan, the way he’d toyed with Mac for a week, but gives way to frustration when Dennis gets to the plan’s origin. Because now Mac’s on the hot seat too, it’s two wrongs that don’t make him right and he doesn’t get to just be mad anymore. So they both yell at each other until the landlord bangs on their door telling them to shut up, and at some point they switch to competing over who can do the most push-ups. One thing leads to another, competition becoming debate over physiques becoming watching _Predator_ for the millionth time to argue over which actor is built the best.  It all blows over, the way everything does. So things return to their version of normal.

More or less.

Mac is still pissy about it for a few days, but soon enough he gets into another scheme and completely forgets about it. Dennis stores it away with the other useless information he might need later, updates his file on Mac, and then pushes it aside for more interesting things like that idea Frank has about dealing fake drugs to middle schoolers.

He starts locking his door at night, but that’s obvious- he’s not going to let himself get played so easily again, he’s a man who learns from his mistakes. Mac locks his door too. Everything else is normal. They walk to the bar together in the morning, do crazy shit with the gang, and then walk back home at night. They rag on Dee; they try to stop Charlie from doing anything stupid enough to finally take down the bar; they argue with Frank about the finances. Exactly the same as usual.

Which is why it’s weird that Dennis keeps waking up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat- which is gross, so he has to take a shower every time to get clean again. He can’t figure out why that is. Sometimes when he wakes up, he swears he feels hands on him, so he looks up sleep paralysis but that doesn’t seem to be it. So he doesn’t know _what_ it is, and decides it’s nothing.

It doesn’t get better, but it doesn’t get worse, either, so Dennis does what every man must to survive in the world- adjusts. The rest of his emotional state, if it can even be called that, remains more or less the same. He goes weeks without feeling anything but bursts of anger and sometimes, at night, a bit of fear. Then he feels everything, too much, feels things he can’t even explain because there’s no reason to be crying, no reason to be laughing, he just starts and stops at random for hours at a time until, a few days later, his feelings switch off again. It’s the same cycle as always, and if the schedule is speeding up a bit, he doesn’t give it much thought.

Dee looks at him like he’s going crazy, and pulls him to the side to ask why he’s been on edge, but he genuinely can’t give her an answer. He doesn’t even see the edge anywhere nearby. So he deflects, calls her a dumb ugly bird, and she sighs in exasperation and gives up.

He’s hanging out with Charlie more, which is really neither good nor bad. Mostly they get kind of high and make shit up, sometimes writing songs and sometimes thinking up movie ideas. Frank gets jealous and asks why Dennis is always coming around, why he isn’t out fucking around with Mac, and Dennis tells him to fuck off. He really can’t think of any good reason to be avoiding Mac, and he doesn’t think he is. They just aren’t hanging out as much. Sometimes, shit just happens.

Mac is annoying, and that’s not anything new. After 25 years, Dennis is starting to lose patience. He feels himself get tense when he hears Mac ambling around the apartment, and movie nights are getting tedious. More than anything else, Mac is just getting on his nerves, and Dennis finds himself losing his temper with him pretty often.

One night, Mac sidles up to him slowly in the kitchen, pretending to dust the counter and not making eye contact when he asks with a falsely light tone if he’s done something to make Dennis mad recently. He thinks he’s subtle, and that delusion more than anything else sets off Dennis’s short fuse again, so he scratches him. Mac covers the wound with his hand, eyes watering, and asks why Dennis hates him. He asks if it’s because they had sex, and Dennis throws him out of the apartment. He gets the lock changed the very next day.

Mac acts like a kicked puppy at the bar, and when the other three ask, Dennis explains that he’s finally gotten fed up with Mac’s bullshit. That sounds fair enough to them, but it isn’t long before they’re _also_ fed up with his bullshit, and they’re trying to paw him back off on Dennis again. But it’s not so easy this time. Now, if Dennis doesn’t have someone to peel his apple, he just doesn’t eat it. It’s not like he needs those calories anyway. Sure, he doesn’t have a sidekick to get him out of a jam, but honestly Mac was always more likely to get him _into_ a jam than out of one, and now Dennis has kicked off the old ball and chain.

Frank pays Dee to let Mac live with her, just so he and Charlie don’t have to deal with him, and things settle back down again. It’s not like Dennis has cut Mac off or anything- he’s just fed up of living with the guy. Dennis sleeps better when he lives alone, if not exactly well. The two of them still hang out at the bar and make stupid, awesome decisions together. They’re friends, more or less. They just aren’t blood brothers. There’s no reason for the change, really. It’s the same ‘reason’ he doesn’t sleep through the night anymore; he’s grown out of it. Dennis can stave off the physical effects of age with diets and make-up, but some things are inevitable. That’s just how things are.


	2. Tolerant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> damn this one's almost twice as long as the first. wild. also, i do try to reference in this one that Dennis is himself EXTREMELY predatory

There’s a world where he doesn’t forget, and doesn’t know why not.

He’s looking for something else when he finds it. He’s turning Mac’s room inside out, convinced his gym membership card is in here somewhere- he needs it, there’s a cute girl he saw walking in there earlier and now he has to start hanging out there to DENNIS her- and, instead of the card, finds a videotape hidden under the mattress.

He pops it into the VHS, and isn’t surprised to see Mac giving the camera a thumbs up before turning to his bed and plowing some pillow princess in the ass. It’s gross, and he fast-forwards to see if there’s anything actually interesting or just more home-made porn, and at some point Mac flips the guy over and goes down on him. When he does, Dennis gets an actual look at the dude, and he pauses the video then.

That’s him. That’s _him._ The pillow princess isn’t some dude taking it easy in the sack, it’s _him, passed out_ , and _damn_ it feels way creepier to be on the other end of that equation. Dennis rewinds the tape back to the beginning, and then hides it back in its original home under the mattress. Heart pulsing in his throat, he puts everything in Mac’s room back where it was before and retreats to his own room, gym card forgotten.

So, that happened. Dennis doesn’t really know what to do with it. On the one hand, it’s gross and disgusting and creepy. On the other, though, it isn’t entirely a surprise. Mac has been watching his sex tapes for years, and watching him fuck in the bunker, and walking in on him during sex or during showers, and making excuses to touch him all the time. This isn’t a huge jump from that. It’s kind of the logical conclusion. And he’s been putting up with _that_ for 25 years, so why should this be different?

Except that it is, somehow. Part of Dennis is reasoning that he got a blowjob out of it, so it was actually kind of a plus for him, but he doesn’t really buy it. He doesn’t even remember the blowjob, and he has no idea if he came while he was blacked out- he didn’t get that far in the video- so it doesn’t feel like a plus. It feels like Mac was just being creepy.

But it’s _Mac_. Mac, who runs the bar with him and the gang; who’s been his best friend since high school; who peels his apples and watches _Predator_ with him every Tuesday. Mac might be a pain in the ass, but he’s _Dennis’s_ pain in the ass. The irony of that phrase is not lost on him, and he throws up into his trash can. If he’s going to be throwing up, he should go to the bathroom, really, but he doesn’t want to leave his room until he sorts this out. The thought of sex with Mac is repulsive, like when he thought he’d gotten Dee pregnant, and Dennis throws up again. His gag reflex is resistant to fingers but extremely susceptible to thoughts.

He’s making too big a deal out of it. It was creepy, sure, and definitely gross- god, if only he had a private bathroom- but it wasn’t really that out of the ordinary. He and Mac have been figuratively fucking each other for years, does it really matter that it was a little more literal this time? What is he going to do, flip his shit and upend his entire life just because of a little ass play? He’s never liked it, but it’s not the first time it’s been done to him, and at least this time he was passed out. It’s not really a big deal. Mac is gay for him, what’s new? He just upgraded from blowing his loads into a Dennis sex doll to blowing his loads into Dennis himself.

Thank god for the trash can.

The thought of Mac fucking him is gross, but if he’s being honest Mac isn’t the ugliest person he’s slept with. The old women during the thing with the mafia were pretty disgusting, and he accidentally fucked two dudes during the gay bar scheme too. So this is nothing new. So it’s fine. And, anyway, if he lets Mac keep the tape, it’ll give Mac less reason to try to walk in on him again. Dennis will just let him have the tape, and watch how much he drinks around him, and let everything stay as it is. If everything was fine an hour ago, and nothing has changed in the past hour, then logically everything is fine now. Watching a videotape doesn’t change anything.

Dennis spends the rest of the night in his room- he doesn’t come out when Mac tells him he made dinner, doesn’t even respond- and eventually Mac takes the hint and leaves him alone. Dennis wakes up a couple of times that night, and when he wakes up for the final time in the morning he’s exhausted, but that’s not particularly unusual. He skips breakfast, but joins Mac for the walk to the bar. Why should he skip work? The bar would fall apart without him. He’s the glue at that place.

Mac talks at him for most of the walk, and keeps trying to ‘subtly’ bump into his arm, or push his hair out of his face, or put a hand on his shoulder, but it feels wrong every time and Dennis slip-n-slides out of the way, barking at Mac that he smells like shit. Mac rolls his eyes and moves to punch him in the arm; Dennis just about has a heart attack diving out the way. Now Mac is staring at him, but thankfully they’re at the bar, so Dennis ignores him and walks in.

Charlie and Dee are already arguing about something stupid, so Mac and Dennis join, and pretty soon Frank rushes in, does a line of coke- damn, Dennis would love some coke- and joins the argument as well. Everything is completely normal. Dee’s a dumb petty bitch, and Charlie says some shit that doesn’t make sense, and Mac keeps peeking over at Dennis all the time with this hurt puppy-dog look like he doesn’t know what he’s done wrong, and Dennis is two seconds away from losing his mind. None of that is out of the ordinary, but for some reason the whole thing feels like a parody of itself. Dennis is being normal, everything is normal, but it _isn’t_ , it’s different somehow, and it’s hard to focus on what’s going on when he doesn’t want to let Mac out of his sight.

It’s weird. It’s _so_ weird, because just thinking about Mac is making him want to throw up (he has to excuse himself so many times throughout the day he’d be surprised no one calls him out if any of his friends ever paid attention to their surroundings) but the thought of not seeing Mac, of not knowing where he is, is even worse.

And it’s out of his _control._ That’s the problem here. He had no say in whether or not he got fucked in the ass, he didn’t even _know_ about it until last night- god knows when it was, god knows if it was only the once- and he doesn’t really have that much say in how he handles it because of the gang. Splitting up has never worked in the past, not when they missed the boat and not when he went to North Dakota, and they run a business together so they’re financially tied to each other, too. Dee would stick with him, Dennis knows that, even if he pissed her off or annoyed her or called her a dumb stupid bird, but the others are an unknown.

Charlie’s been friends with Mac for basically their entire lives, so he’d probably stick with him, no matter _how_ annoying. Obviously Frank would go wherever Charlie went; he wasn’t a dad when they thought he was their father and he isn’t going to start being one now. And he’s the one bankrolling the whole thing, so they would end up keeping the bar because goddamn Dee doesn’t even have any shares. And the _l_ _ast_ time they tried leaving the bar they got addicted to crack, so that’s not really much of an option.

The entire gang is so fucking codependent, and usually he’s resigned himself to that, but now he’s realizing that he’s gotten himself in a position where apparently he’s been fucked in his sleep and there isn’t jack-shit he can do about it. He’s stuck here. He’s _trapped_.

So there’s nothing to do but ignore it. It’s not that weird, Dennis reminds himself. Mac has been trying to get in his pants for years; he finally just snuck in when Dennis wasn’t looking. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

But it makes him desperate to have _something_ he can control, so he settles for food- no more of that, or at least no more than necessary to keep himself up and running. He’s been putting on weight, anyway. He looked awful in the video tape.

Dennis spends the rest of the day trying to act natural, and eventually it’s time to head home and he and Mac walk back to their apartment together, Mac trying to sidle up next to him and Dennis keeping his distance, resisting the urge to yell at him for making everything so weird. When they get home, Dennis grabs an apple- unpeeled- and takes it to his room, locking the door behind him. He throws it away, but at least it’ll look like he ate something.

The process repeats for the next several days. Somehow, Dennis manages to stop thinking about it so much at the same time that he gets tenser and angrier than usual. It helps not to eat- it gives him control, the feeling of hunger grounds him, and it drains the energy he’d need to get _really_ mad.

Mac asks him what’s wrong, and Dennis slams the door in his face. Dee takes him into a corner and tells him to get his shit together and eat something, and he spits at her. Charlie leads him into his Bad Room, and he follows.

The room is a mess, dark as hell, and covered in broken glass, and Dennis tells Charlie exactly what he thinks of this shithole, but Charlie shrugs and offers him some gas. Dennis has manners, so of course he takes it and huffs. A few minutes later, high as shit, the two of them smash bottles against the walls, and their hands get cut to hell, but they don’t particularly mind. Charlie gets the idea to use the blood to draw; Dennis doesn’t join, but he does offer advice on the artistic direction.

It’s impossible to know how much time passes in that windowless room with no clock, especially when the two of them are fading in and out of lucidity, but eventually they’re sitting side by side against one of the walls, huffing some more gas, and Charlie asks what’s been going on with him recently, and to both of their surprise Dennis actually tells him.

Charlie raises his eyebrows, but he doesn’t seem very surprised, and that confirms Dennis’s thoughts on how well it fits with this and Mac’s past- ew- ‘relationship.’ He asks what Dennis plans to do, and Dennis explains the predicament of being completely and utterly trapped, and Charlie nods and says it’s the same for him with Dee. It’s still weird and gross and creepy, and he doesn’t like to be alone with her if he can help it, but 3 or 4 years on it’s not quite as bad and he’s glad he didn’t try to split up the group.

He’s being surprisingly smart, and he notes that his strategy won’t work for Dennis because he lives with Mac- and they both agree that it could definitely happen again, which makes Dennis almost throw up but there’s not much besides bile, so he swallows it back down. Charlie starts using his lawyer voice, and says that Dennis has to _talk_ with Mac about it, which is obviously disgusting so Dennis punches him in the face, and a few minutes later when they’re done rolling around on broken glass and trying to beat each other up, Charlie offers to mediate. Dennis tells him to fuck off. Charlie asks how his current strategy is working for him. Dennis accepts the offer.

The Talk (disgusting) takes place the next night, too soon for Dennis to really plan for it but leaving enough time for him to stress about it for 26 hours. It turns out to be a good thing Charlie’s there, because he’s dumb as hell but at least he keeps the mood relatively light, and he keeps Dennis and Mac from getting into a fist fight at least 3 times. They end up setting up all these new rules, like Mac isn’t allowed to lay a fucking finger on Dennis or swear to god the finger _will_ be broken, and Dennis won’t make a big deal of it at the bar. Dennis will keep his door locked, Mac will keep the tape, and the two of them will walk to and from the bar together but not eat together, but Dennis has to eat _something_ every day, and Mac isn’t allowed to prepare it.

After a rocky start, they handle the whole thing very professionally- reason will prevail- and by the end, it feels like Dennis just negotiated a business deal rather than a strict set of guidelines for interacting with his best friend of 25 years. Charlie takes off, and Mac and Dennis both go to their respective bedrooms, and Dennis locks his door as agreed before heading straight to sleep. He wakes up an hour later breathing hard, with the inescapable feeling that he’s trapped in a box with no air.

The new arrangement starts the next day, and it’s better, even if it’s still weird. Mac keeps trying to talk to Dennis about it, alternating between excuses and apologies, and really Dennis should have seen this coming and put a clause in the contract that gives him the power to shut Mac the hell up. Charlie, as the keeper of the contract, forces Dennis to eat something, and Dennis opts for a low-calorie granola bar. Mac looks relieved to see him eat anything at all, and it takes a shocking amount of willpower not to knock his lights out right there.

Frank and Dee notice that things are different, but only Dee gives enough of a shit to ask about it, so she’s the one they mock mercilessly for it. Things settle into the general usual routine, with absurd schemes and lazy barkeeping, and everyone moves on. Mac doesn’t touch him, but he otherwise acts the same as before- though he stops walking in on Dennis when Dennis threatens to kick him out of the apartment- and keeps talking like Dennis is his best friend. Charlie seems to more of less forget that he was ever involved. Dee finally accepts that she’s out of the loop and gives up trying to figure out what happened. Frank, who didn't give a shit in the first place, never changes at all.

Things are more or less the same as before. Miserable, chaotic, and meaningless, but inevitable. Dennis rarely sleeps through the night, and he’s getting so skinny it might actually be making him _uglier_ , but otherwise things are normal. It’s the only way Dennis knows how to live- in a constant state of chaos, stress, and failed schemes- and he accepts it. The tape goes down as another weird thing Mac has done about his crush. He and Dennis still watch Predator on Tuesdays, and Dennis is silent as Mac gushes over the actors’ bodies. The gang stays together and the bar stays afloat.

It might not be entirely sustainable forever- past experience tells him that his current eating habits will land him in the hospital sooner or later, probably sooner- but it’s working well enough for now. None of the other options, like getting a new roommate or going back to North Dakota, are likely to end any better, given his track record. So he might crash, but that’s inevitable, and eventually he will get back up until the next time he crashes. Right now, he’s functioning, and that’s what counts. As for the rest, he’ll cross that bridge when it burns underneath his feet.


	3. Angry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nevermind, it turns out this one's shorter than the first. I kept getting too detailed when I was writing, then having to delete and rewrite to focus on the longer term, so I guess I ended up overestimating how long it was.

There’s a world where it pisses him off almost more than he can comprehend.

He wakes up in Mac’s room, head full of bees and completely nude. That’s gross, so he stumbles to the bathroom in time to throw up in the toilet, and that’s when he figures it out. There’s a small orange bottle in the trashcan, mostly covered up- very sloppily- with loose toilet paper. That’s immediately suspicious, even to Dennis’s addled brain, and after fishing it out of the garbage and staring at the label for a solid minute, he realizes what it is. Rohypnol.

His first thought is that Mac must be a dumbass to try to hide this in their shared bathroom. His second thought is that the roofies would explain why his brain seems to be working in slow motion. The third thought, a solid 30 seconds after the first one, puts together the pieces and figures out that Mac roofied him last night, and that’s why he woke up in his room.

The initial relief at not having chosen to sleep with his roommate is quickly washed away by a tidal wave of disgust and anger. What kind of person roofies someone? That’s like a rapist! Dennis has only ever used enough to make girls just a bit groggy, never enough to actually knock them out- that would defeat the purpose. Well, apparently Mac didn’t think so.

That pisses off Dennis to no end. To not only _fully roofie_ someone, but to do it to _him?_ His roommate and so-called ‘best friend?’ Bullshit! That’s bullshit! Dennis had told him a million times that he wasn’t interested, and apparently Mac had taken that as his cue to be sneaky. Not even subtle, trying to slowly win Dennis over- he just drugged him and fucked him while he was passed out! Gross. _Gross._

Dennis doesn’t leave the bathroom until almost everything in it is suitably broken, including both the mirror and the shower door. When he’s done, he grabs his bathrobe and storms back into Mac’s room. The world is still spinning a little, and his head is heavy, but pure spite spurs him on. He goes in hot, and Mac startles awake with a little karate chop that Dennis instantly zeroes in on and ridicules him for.

It takes no time at all for the two of them to get into a screaming match, but Mac backs down when Dennis throws the pill bottle at him. He looks between Dennis and the bottle, and grimaces sheepishly. He starts to make some excuse, and Dennis claws him across the face. He’s still talking, so Dennis keeps clawing, forcing Mac into the common area and towards the door. Eventually Mac flees, and Dennis screams after him to never bother coming back.

He’s gone pretty quickly, but the white-hot rage in Dennis’s gut doesn’t lessen at all, so he destroys damn near everything in the apartment. He breaks the phone when it rings, and opens the door armed with a baseball bat when someone comes knocking. It turns out to be Frank, who drops his bag of raw meat in surprise and then asks what’s up. Dennis, head still swimming from the drug and eyes nearly watering in his fury, screams an explanation at him, and Frank just nods before asking Dennis what his plans are for revenge.

Dennis doesn’t really trust him, because Frank has never had his best interests in mind, but he’s thinking Frank’s distaste for Mac will outweigh his general frustration with his son this time. He turns out to be right, because Frank hooks him up with a guy who mugs Mac and beats the shit out of him for a pretty low price- most of the pay comes from Mac’s pockets. He also blocks Mac from moving in to his apartment, pays to reinforce the locks on Dee’s doors so he can’t get in there either, and then refuses to pay for a new place for Mac to live. When Mac asks why, Frank just shrugs and tells him that if he hasn’t figured out how to support himself at his age, then he doesn’t deserve a handout anyway. What does he look like, the government?

Normally, Dennis would wonder what Frank was getting out of helping him, but this time the answer was obvious- watching Mac squirm. Frank’s always been a sick son of a bitch, so this is right up his alley. Charlie and Dee don’t actively work against Mac, but they don’t really help him either. Dee’s had enough of living with him, and Charlie points out that Mac wouldn’t take him in during the recession, and his mom even took Mac’s mom in free of charge when she burned down her house, so he really doesn’t owe him shit.

Dennis goes out of his way for a few days to avoid Mac as much as possible while he works on calming the anger and disgust still crawling along his spine. He doesn’t sleep well or for very long, and he’s so busy planning revenge that he forgets to eat, but if anything the sleep deprivation and hunger only fuel him.

Eventually it becomes impossible to avoid the other man, so Dennis stops trying and settles on a new goal- making Mac’s place in the group as miserable as possible. He stops ragging on Dee so much and redirects his scorn towards his old roommate instead. Dee and Charlie don’t really know what’s going on with them, but Dee grabs at the chance to not be the butt of the joke anymore, and Charlie goes along with it when Frank joins in, because he’s never been much of an independent thinker.

Mac doesn’t just sit by, obviously. He tries getting back in Dennis’s good graces, he tries having a Talk with him, he even tries physically intimidating him, but he isn’t counting on Dennis having borrowed one of Frank’s guns. That shuts him up pretty quickly, because he knows Dennis is just looking for an excuse to use it.

After that, Mac announces loudly that he’s leaving the gang once and for all to find better friends who will understand him and accept Jesus into their hearts, and Dennis bids him good riddance. Of course, it doesn’t last long, because the gang is too codependent to break up for very long. Mac can’t find any other friends to put up with him, and without Mac to focus his rage on, Dennis finds himself having random breakdowns almost every day. It’s only a week before Mac is back, sulking in the corner of the bar and pretending nothing happened. The rest of the gang plays along. Dennis continues to torment him, and finds himself able to sleep again- more or less.

Things fall into a new version of the old routine. Mac finds an absolute shithole of an apartment to live in and slowly amasses a new wardrobe to replace the one Dennis destroyed. Charlie minds his own business, and out of fear or reversing her good fortune, Dee uncharacteristically does the same. The gang keeps doing schemes, all of which fail, and at least half of which Dennis finds a way to use against Mac somehow. Mac settles uneasily into his new role as the group’s butt-monkey. Frank forgets he was ever involved in any of it.

Sometimes, Dennis thinks about the things he and Mac used to do together, almost misses him, but he shuts those thoughts down with more rage, because it’s easier to feel anger than a weird combination of regret, nostalgia, disgust, grief, love, hatred, and terror. His doctor tells him that his blood pressure is way too high, that combining that with his malnutrition at his age is like begging for a heart attack, and Dennis tells him to fuck off. What the hell does he know? Just because he went to medical school, suddenly he knows more about Dennis’s body than the man who’s lived there for 43 years? As if.

It comes as a surprise to him when, a month later, the doctor turns out to be right.


	4. Scared

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last one, and it's about the same length as the second. I was starting to lose interest by this point because I have the attentions span of a worm, so it might end a little abruptly.

There’s a world where it just about breaks him.

It happens in the middle of an argument. They’re screaming at each other, and Dennis is saying the cruelest things he can think of. Mac isn’t backing down like usual, he’s acting weird, he’s giving as good as he gets. Things get out of hand. Dennis lunges at Mac and then finds himself on the floor, and apparently something is different this time because instead of yelling at him to calm down or even hitting him, Mac is just pulling down his pants and then-

It’s so fast Dennis barely has time to react, and _fuck_ it’s painful. He instinctively moves to get out from under Mac but a hand on his throat stops him, and the next few minutes are a very confusing blur of pain, bafflement, and thousands of escape plans popping in and out of his head. Mac is still grabbing his neck the whole time and squeezes when Dennis tries to move or say anything and honestly the whole thing is going on so much longer than he thought it would. Either Mac is taking his time or the fourth dimension is stretching itself out because it seems to be forever before Mac leans down and whispers into Dennis’s ear not to forget that Mac isn’t going to just take his bullshit anymore, then finally- finally- gets up, zips his jeans back up, and slams the door to his room.

Dennis’s brain is still on overdrive trying to figure out what the hell just happened, and his throat hurts and his ass hurts, and the number one priority is getting the _hell_ out of the apartment so he pushes himself up and grabs his phone from the table with one hand while pulling his pants back up with the other, not even bothering to put his shoes on properly on the way out.

He doesn’t realize he’s crying- that’s new, he hasn’t done that in a while- until someone on the street asks if he’s okay, and he surprises himself by crying harder and limping away. Then he’s sitting against the side of a building and Dee’s car is pulling up and she’s getting out, looking first annoyed and then confused. She says he texted her 911 about a hundred times and asks what the hell happened. Dennis just blinks at her- his eyes are wet, he’s still crying, apparently- and jerks away violently when she reaches out a hand to help him up.

Dee threatens to leave and Dennis shakes his head, getting up and rambling what even he recognizes is nonsense about not touching. He follows her into the car and keeps a hand on the door handle for the ride just in case he has to jump out suddenly.

He blinks and they’re in her apartment. The whole room smells like her- terrible, but familiar. Calming. He isn’t crying anymore, so that’s an improvement. Dee walks in with some cases of beer, and the two of them drink until they pass out.

They wake up in the morning with massive hang overs and spend at least an hour shoving each other out of the way to get better access to the toilet when they puke. They get some of the hair of the dog that bit them and, soon enough, are able to talk again. Dee asks what the hell happened last night, and what the bruises on his neck are. Dennis puts a hand on his neck to see what she means, and for a moment manages to forget that it’s his own hand and pulls away so quickly he falls out of his stool. Dee laughs at him.

They drink some more for a while. Eventually she tells him that he’s going to have to get the fuck out of her apartment and go back to his own, that Mac has left her a thousand messages in her voicemail asking if she knows where he is. Then she’s yelling at him for breaking her coffee table and asking what the fuck is wrong with him, and for once he actually tells her because firstly, he’s still having a hard time wrapping his head around it, and secondly, she’s the other half of him and they’ve never kept secrets from each other, not really.

Dee asks if he’s planning on staying at her apartment. She doesn’t really want him to but she’ll put up with it for a few weeks while he gets the rest of his shit together, so long as he pays for a new coffee table. Dennis agrees to it, and is grateful that Dee lets the subject drop. They get caught up in idea for a new musical and spend the rest of the day rehearsing dance numbers to Steve Winwood songs. When he starts thinking again about what happened and gets upset he takes a shot and forgets again. There’s important work at hand- Winwood awaits.

They finally head to sleep around midnight, and the second time Dennis shudders awake Dee punches him in the arm and makes him take Ambien. He does. She wakes him up 11 hours later with a cardboard box in the corner and a satisfied look in her face. She tells him that she went back to his apartment- she stole his keys- to grab some of his shit and stab Mac with a fork, and he laughs. They celebrate with champagne.

Soon enough it’s time to head to Paddy’s, and Dennis is thinking of maybe skipping instead to grab some crack real quick, and Dee is briefly tempted but convinces him to go first by telling him not to be a selfish piece of shit and then by saying that Mac isn’t going to be coming in because she threatened him with a knife. Dennis is kind of surprised that Dee is being so helpful, and tells her so, but instead of taking it as a compliment she scowls at him and rolls her eyes.

Things at the bar start off pretty smooth. Dennis yells at Frank not to touch him, and Frank goes out of his way to touch him more to piss him off until Dennis scratches him in the face and he backs off. Charlie seems to sense that something is off but he doesn’t know what it is and doesn’t want to ask. He keeps complaining about Mac not showing up until Dennis threatens to eat his eyeballs, and then switches to complaining about the secret government making pigeons illegal. Everything is mostly normal, but every time the door opens Dennis’s heart jumps into his throat until he sees who it is. He also yells a lot, which isn’t entirely unusual.

The problem comes the next day when Mac comes back into the pub and Dennis ends up hiding in a bathroom stall and having a panic attack. Mac follows him in after a few minutes and Dennis is about ready to have an aneurysm, biting his tongue so hard he tastes blood and he remembers thinking he was a vampire back in elementary school and wishes he could turn into a bat right now and fly away because he doesn’t want to be here. Everything is out of his control and he _hates_ it, he hates not being able to control or predict what’s going to happen. He thought he could, but the other night proved him wrong.

Mac is saying something and Dennis can feel his skin trying its best to crawl off his body, but Dee comes to his rescue and chases Mac out of the bathroom. She asks Dennis if he’s alright. He doesn’t answer, because if he opens his mouth he’ll start screaming. She leaves.

Dennis pulls at his hair, trying to get his shit together. He hates when he gets like this, when everything gets loud and bright and his feelings are spilling all over the place. He doesn’t much like being numb, but it’s infinitely better than _this,_ with his throat so tight he can barely breathe and the buzzing in his head drowning out his thoughts but not the sound of people talking at the bar.

He closes his eyes and holds his breath for a few seconds, releases it, and repeats the process. He reminds himself that it doesn’t matter- nothing does- and that this is all beneath him. ‘Feelings’ aren’t real, they’re a trick of the mind, and Dennis has control over _his_ mind. He doesn’t have feelings. He never has. The buzzing in his head slows and condenses into a blanket of fog. He realizes it’s stupid to be hiding in the bathroom- not to mention disgusting- and starts to get up, but settles back down at the spike of panic that shoots up his ribs. Not yet, then.

He keeps breathing and repeating to himself over and over that it doesn’t matter until the message really seems to settle in. When it does, he counts to ten and gets up.

Everyone is staring at him when he comes out of the bathroom, but a burst of humiliation is quickly smothered into nothingness and he ignores it. He starts heading to the back room, but instead he blinks and finds himself wiping down the bar. All the customers are gone. He blinks again and he’s back in Dee’s apartment. She’s saying something from the kitchen, but he can’t be bothered to listen. He goes to her room and falls asleep almost immediately.

A new normal is established. Dee keeps telling him to sleep on the couch, Dennis keeps sharing the bed with her, and she keeps letting him. Their daily routine is more or less the same as always, with some exceptions. Dennis doesn’t yell as often, mostly because he doesn’t really care. Dee still yells plenty, but Dennis tunes her out most of the time, which just makes her yell more. He’s not eating much, because the hunger helps drown out his growing God Hole. Dee doesn’t call him out for it, she just starts eating less, too, because that’s what they’ve always done together, but Dennis tells her that she shouldn’t bother because she’s already freakishly, disgustingly skinny.

Dennis is pretty sure he’s still going to the bar for work, since Dee hasn’t said that he isn’t, but he doesn’t really remember or care either way. He’s just sort of popping in and out of his own life; he figures he’ll settle back in when it really matters. Dee tells him that Mac has been trying to talk to him for days. Dennis doesn’t really have any memory of that, either. He’s watching TV in Dee’s living room. He’s getting high in the back office with Charlie. He’s sitting at Dave and Busters with Frank and Mac. He’s in somebody’s house, but he doesn’t know whose. He’s only got one foot in his body at any given time.

That ends when he goes back to his and Mac’s apartment to pick up some stuff Dee left behind; one moment he’s cruising on autopilot in a fuzzy limbo zone, the next he’s being slammed back into his body so hard he has to stop to catch his breath. The apartment looks and smells familiar, and Dennis realizes suddenly that he misses it almost more than he’s ever missed anything, but he also has a voice in the back of his head screaming at him to get the fuck out of there. This isn’t his place anymore.

Dennis manages to get himself together enough to carry the empty box he brought into his room to grab whatever he can fit and still lift. He’s just throwing stuff in haphazardly when the door to the hallway starts to open again. Goddammit, Mac is supposed to be at the gym for another hour, what the hell is he doing back so early?

But it’s too late to cut and run, so Mac opens the door and sees Dennis in his room. He freezes. Dennis thinks of the knife he keeps in his bedside drawer, just in case. But then Mac is crying and apologizing, and it’s gross, really, and Dennis doesn’t have the time or patience for this right now. Mac is saying some shit about having been high on PCP. Dennis is grabbing the last few things that matter- including the knife- and getting ready to get the hell out of there.

Mac tries to grab him on his way out, but Dennis swings at him with the knife and he backs off. Dennis hurries down the stairs so fast he nearly falls three separate times. He makes it to the Range Rover in one piece, and slams his foot on the gas. He’s not particularly interested in having a conversation with Mac; he’d rather tear out his fucking fingernails.

Dennis’s heart- turns out he has one- is in his throat again, and it won’t go back down. He can’t find the foggy place in his brain where he can wait out the unfortunate ‘feelings,’ the numb detachment he’s taken on almost full time. It’s just _panic,_ and _anger,_ and _regret_ , and not a single one of those is any use to him at all right now. He sees a pedestrian crossing the road and it takes all of his willpower not to hit the bastard with his car. His car keeps swerving out of its lane and people keep honking at him and it’s so _loud,_ goddammit, why the hell is everything so loud all the time?

When he finally makes it back to Dee’s apartment, he parks haphazardly in a mostly empty area of the parking garage and staggers- practically falls- out of his car. He wants to break something. He wants to disappear. He wants to claw his skin off. He wants to hide somewhere dark and quiet and not move for days. He wants to make someone bleed. He wants to stop feeling so much. He wants to go back to normal and watch Predator with Mac and argue about physiques without feeling a hand on his neck and Mac’s weight on his back. He wants to scream.

Dee opens the door and takes an immediate step back- she’s not completely lacking in self-preservation instincts. Dennis’s face is red and he’s shaking, the vein in his forehead looking ready to burst. She doesn’t try to follow him when he storms into her bathroom and locks the door behind him. He spends the night in there, as far as she can tell, but he’s in the kitchen cooking food she’s pretty sure he won’t eat when she wakes up in the morning. He’s wearing more makeup than usual, and it makes him look a little ridiculous, but there’s a real possibility he’ll lose his shit if she points it out so she keeps it to herself.

Dennis still goes in to work, because why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t he? He’s fine. He has a plan. It’s fine. He’s not going to hole himself up in his sister’s shithole apartment forever, he’s not a _coward_ , he’s not hiding, he’s fine. Everyone at the bar gives him a wide berth, even Mac, who keeps looking over at him with big, sad eyes that Dennis would love to scratch right out of their sockets. He’s not going away again. He’s not fading to black, passing the time in whatever limbo he goes to when he blacks out. He’s still here, and he still feels like one giant pulsating nerve that’s ready to burst.

He has to do something. This isn’t fine. He can’t just stand around, 2 minutes away from an aneurysm, while Mac throws himself a pity party in the corner and everyone thinks he’s lost his mind. He’s better than that. He’s a god- he is the _Golden God_ , and he will not tolerate this disrespect. He will not sit and watch himself fall apart.

Frank’s car isn’t locked, because it never is- the old bastard never remembers to lock it- so it’s easy to get into the trunk. There are plenty of guns in there. Dennis goes for the one that looks most familiar, that will fit in his hand and he’ll know how to use. It’s loaded with six rounds, but he’ll only need one. Maybe two. He isn’t going to wait for his brain to explode, or for Mac to disappear forever like he never existed. That’s never going to happen. The way things are going it seems like nothing will. So Dennis will _make_ something happen.


End file.
